by David Ryker
“You take right,” I barked at Fish. “I’ll go left.”
He acknowledged with a nod of the cam dome and charged off in the opposite direction.
I took a breath and went left. “Greg, talk to me. How many rooms are we looking at here?”
“There are sixty-eight possible rooms in which Pilot Kepler may be held.”
“Shit,” I groaned, sliding around a corner and shouldering my rifle. A droid was hammering toward me, nearly as tall as my rig, wide-shouldered and propped up on a pair of tank tracks churning furiously on the concrete floor. Its face was a screen displaying a warning sign and its arms were raised.
Both were gun barrels. I didn’t know what sort, but I didn’t want to find out. They were peacekeeping droids — heavy duty and cold, but not too smart — and I guessed with shotguns for hands a lot of their peacekeeping involved blowing away whatever wasn’t being peaceful.
“Smokescreen,” I yelled, pulling the droid into my crosshairs.
Greg smoked the corridor with a quick burst, throwing off the targeting system of the approaching droid, and I pinned the trigger, watching as the muzzle flash pulsed on the cloud, the bullets punching through and hitting steel on the other side.
A loud crunch told me the droid was down and a second later I was dashing over its corpse toward the first door. It was locked but didn’t put up much of a fight. I put my heel through it and it splintered inward, banging on the wall and swinging loosely on its hinges.
Empty. Shit. And it wasn’t even like I could call Fish and ask if he’d turned anything up with Mac’s scrambler running. The sound of gunfire echoing in the hallways told me he was working hard, at least.
“Can’t you do anything?” I shouted at Greg, pulling myself into the doorway of the empty room just as bullets started flying past me.
“I’m unable to locate Pilot Kepler’s biometric profile. This area is too large and is saturated with heat signatures.”
I growled inside my helmet, stepping back into the hall and letting off a stream of fire. A Wint at the next junction shuddered as the rounders hit it in the stomach, chest, and then shoulder. It spun to the ground and a pool of greenish blood began pooling on the concrete. I grimaced and pushed forward. “Can you at least tell me which rooms aren’t empty? We’re wasting time here.”
“That I can do,” Greg said. “Enabling an infrared pulse.”
The screen in front of me started to strobe. Every few seconds, it shimmered in blues and yellows before turning back to a normal display. In the sea of cold colors, splotches of heat swam beyond the walls. I breathed a sigh of relief — this was going to make it easier. I could already see a bunch of rooms that were empty and could be skipped.
I pushed on to the edge of the corridor, seeing a yellow shape moving slowly to intercept me from an adjacent hallway. I pulled my rifle up to my shoulder, watching it out of my peripheral as I closed the distance.
I paused just as I reached it and held fast on the rifle. The shape slowed and stepped cautiously to the corner. I watched as its legs shuffled to the edge and then stepped out, putting one in the thigh. The Wint there, huge and hairy, sagged, letting out a high-pitched scream, which I quickly extinguished with two rounds to the upper chest. The light from its eyes faded and it slumped backward, bulbous nose lolling limply over its forehead.
It seemed like a lot of the bodies on the floor were scrambling for cover judging by the heat signatures diving around. They definitely hadn’t been expecting us — that much was clear. And I knew Fish was wreaking havoc wherever he was, too — it was just his way.
Without any communications to aid them, the Guard must have been shitting themselves more than just a little, and that suited us just fine — we wanted to be in and out as quickly as we could, and if that happened to be before they even figured out what the hell was happening, then that was even better.
I stepped forward, scanning the yellow blobs for anything human-sized, when one of the reptilian creatures slithered around the next corner. It reared up and pumped off a few shots from a huge shotgun. The scatter clanged into my hull and my screen lit up and flashed red. That one definitely wasn’t shooting beanbags, and I hadn’t even seen it coming.
“Greg, what the hell?” I snarled, diving sideways out of the path of another load of buckshot. I hit the wall and tried to raise my arms, but one was pinned. “For fuck sake!” I grunted, releasing the Samson and reaching for my pistol.
More pellets dinged my hull and my screen cracked, a white line lancing down from the top and disappearing off to my left. Some of the fire must have hit my cam dome.
I heaved the pistol up and squeezed off a round into center mass, blowing a hole right through the creature’s guts. It wailed and twisted in the air, tail writhing, as its yellowed insides spilled onto the floor. I hauled myself onto my knees and then back to my feet, picking up my rifle. “Well?” I said, “What the fuck was that? Why didn’t we see him?” I demanded, circling its twitching corpse.
“It appears that as a reptilian species, they are cold-blooded, and won’t show up on thermal scans.”
“Well, that’s fucking helpful.”
“I would say that it is probably the opposite.”
I growled. “Sarcasm, Greg. Sarcasm.”
I put my heel through another door and stepped in, sirens still wailing from the droids and the ceiling. Lights flashed in circles and muzzle smoke and blood mist lingered in the air, thick and pungent. My teeth were grinding and my head was pounding. With each splintered door and each empty room, the gnawing feeling in my guts that this was about to go seriously wrong was getting worse and worse.
“Alice!” I yelled, stomping in and turning to the desk bolted to the floor in the center. A humanoid male with feathers protruding from his forehead looked at me, and then cocked his head, his wattle jiggling. He squawked something from his beak-like lips and I turned away, jumping back out of the room as he jangled his chains at me. That was the tenth heat signature that might have been her, and time was running out.
I broke left and headed for the next bank of doors. They were tall enough for me to move through, but split at the bottom for humanoids to get in and out, though that didn’t narrow it down at all.
I stepped into an intersection and got blindsided by one of the droids. It was motoring along and swept me clean off my feet, planting me on the concrete ground in a flurry of sparks. I swore under my breath and tried to turn over, but it was on top of me. I could hear the gears grinding as it tried to move its arms into a position that it could shoot me full of holes. Its face-siren blared in my ears as I fought to turn over.
I grunted and rolled the other way, slamming my hands into the concrete and dipping my toes forward. I heard the roar of my thrusters echo in the halls, and then I catapulted around like a top, throwing off the droid and losing my Samson at the same time. Greg’s feet ground on the floor as the inertia righted us and he targeted the droid automatically. I reached for my plasma pistol just as it levered itself upright and stuck it into its guts, pumping the trigger three times. The first round died inside it, the second blew out its back, and the third poked a hole in the ceiling and ate into the concrete floor above.
I shoved it over and kept going, grabbing my rifle on the way. We were on borrowed time now, and I was just about done with fighting off fucking droids and reptiles.
I headed down the corridor I’d been aiming for initially and froze, stepping sideways and drawing instinctively. Fish did the same from the other end, both of us lowering our guns when we realized who the other was. “Man, am I glad to see you,” I said, sighing with relief.
“Comms are still down,” Greg announced. “He cannot hear you.”
“I know,” I said, not able to stop myself smiling. “I was talking to myself.”
There were four doors on the bank we were checking. I turned to the first and kicked it through, revealing a thin gray being with glassy eyes. Definitely not Alice. It whistled at me and
gestured to the chains fastening it to the table, but I wasn’t here to liberate anyone except who we came for — and Kera’s man, obviously, but he wasn’t on this floor, and there was no way we were going after him until Alice was safe.
I backed out of the room instead and went to the next door just as Fish put his first through.
“The heat signature in this room is far too low to be Pilot Kepler,” Greg said halfway through my windup, “unless she’s suffering from severe hypothermia.”
I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or just Greg’s definitive reasoning. But, either way, I skipped that one and Fish and I converged on the last door.
I took a breath and dipped my shoulder as Fish hovered at the frame with his shotgun raised. The door burst on the hinges and we both slid into the room, pistols raised.
There, doubled over on the table, was a human, a pool of short brown hair, spilled over chained and raw wrists.
“Alice,” I said, the word choked in my throat.
The table was low down, dwarfed in the huge room, but it didn’t matter. There was no mistaking her. I pulled my hands out of the gloves and reached up for the hatch release. Greg knelt automatically, and Fish stepped back into the doorway to cover the corridor.
My boots hit the thin carpeting and I sprang forward, eyes stinging in the glow of the over-bright halogens.
I leaped over the table, sliding across, and hit the floor next to her. My hands laced under her outstretched arms and I pulled her head up. She was barely conscious, and even through the matted hair, I could tell that she’d been beaten. Her face was swollen and her cheek was black, lip split, her one barely-open eye bloodied, all the white around her iris blotted out. “Jesus Christ, Alice! Can you hear me?”
She mumbled something, but her mouth wouldn’t move. I could see her jaw was off center. Fucking hell, was it broken? Dislocated?
I lowered myself so that we were level. Alice, can you hear me? I asked, hoping our neural link was still active.
R… Red? Is… Is that you?
Her voice sounded distant and meek, even in my head. Yeah, it’s me. We’re getting you out of here.
W— Where are… Are you… What’s...
Shh, don’t talk. I’ll explain everything when you’re safe. Come on. We need to get you up. I smiled as widely as I could and nodded at her, wondering if she could even see me. “Greg,” I barked, pulling Alice’s arms tight against the cuffs. “The chains.”
Greg moved toward us and stretched out a finger and thumb toward the steel ring holding her down. He grasped and twisted it as though turning a tiny knob. It snapped clean off the table with a loud clap and then fell off her cuffs and settled on the scratched top.
She curled her hands to her chest and fell against me. I cradled her dead weight for the second time in as many weeks, and couldn’t help but think there was a common denominator here.
She hadn’t backed off when I’d told her to, when everyone had told her to, and she’d gotten herself into this. But why? Why was what was on my mind. Why didn’t she listen to them? To me? I felt her forehead, feverish against my collar, and swallowed hard. Was it just something she had to prove?
The Falmouth had been bad luck — if it’d been me that was hurt and not her, she would have done the same, right? I pressed my cheek to her head. Why did she have to be so stubborn? We were supposed to be a team. We needed to listen to each other, to have each other's backs — we hadn’t, and this was the result of that discord.
“Greg,” I said, turning toward him. “Take her.”
He bent forward, hatch still open, and reached out. I handed her over and he scooped her up as gently as he could, her head lolling over her shoulder, jaw bulbous and offset, and lowered her into his torso. She slumped backward in the seat and I climbed to reach her, looping the harness over her chest and securing it as best I could. I nodded to myself, jumping down. “Okay,” I sighed, “let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Greg stood up, closed the hatch, and made a fist, his thumb stiffly sticking out from the three-fingered steel sledgehammer on the end of his arm.
I returned it, feeling very, very small all of a sudden. Our ride wasn’t far, but it wasn’t going to be any fun getting there. As we stepped back through the cavernous doorway and into the corridor, I became distinctly aware of just how tiny and frail humans were compared to the rest of the universe. I swallowed and drew my pistol, dialing it up to the lethal setting — though it didn’t make me feel any better.
I looked up at Greg and Fish and their steel visages looming over me, hardy and cold. “Alright, let’s go.”
23
Everything was a blur. Greg scooped me up and made after Fish, who was motoring. We left a trail of thick smoke in our wake and ahead, Fish was plowing through whatever got in our path.
We weren’t heading for the elevators — no, forty-four floors down in that thing seemed like a very tall order considering the circumstances. There was only one way out, and we hoped that they’d be ready.
Fish hung a right and made a beeline for the landing deck. He blinked out of view, shimmering for a second before reappearing ten meters down the corridor, blades sunk into the guts of a droid ready to open fire on us. Bullets flew all around as we crossed intersections, ran into more Guard, and cleared them with near reckless abandon. I fired blindly behind us, standing on Greg’s arm.
He had it crooked across his chest and I had one hand on the steel handle above the hatch, and the other on my pistol, firing over his shoulder into the cloud of smoke we were trailing. He, on the other hand, had the plasma pistol raised and was firing ahead, covering Fish.
The cold air hit us like a wall as we burst out of the doors and onto the landing deck. It was cut into the building like a mouth, doming above over a protrusion hanging over the city like a precipice.
“Fish, light the beacon,” I yelled over the windrush, trying to shut out the freezing air as it slithered down my collar and gnawed at my ribs. I pulled my coat taut but it didn’t do anything. The air was frozen, and in seconds, so were my hands.
Shapes loomed in the smoke behind as we hammered across the landing deck, feet clanging on the concrete. The noise rung in the gloom for an instant before being swept away on the wind.
Fish streaked ahead, curling his arm into his chest before slinging a disc-shaped device onto the ground. It slid toward the edge under the raw sky above and hummed to life, flashing a pale blue strobe into the low clouds above.
“Here’s to hoping they see it,” I called, gripping onto Greg for dear life as he thundered forward. Fish got there first, skidding to a halt before turning and going to a knee, locked on the door behind us. Nothing was coming through yet.
Greg reached level with the beacon and turned to face the door, too, letting me down as he did. “Stay behind me,” he commanded, drawing the huge Samson off his back and shouldering it. He knelt next to Fish and honed in on the doors. They were hanging open, a little buckled from where we’d smashed through them, but no one was spilling out, which we didn’t expect. They’d been right on our asses a second ago.
“Greg?” I called, clumsily zipping up my jacket, pistol peering around his huge calf.
“I detect heat readings as well as movement, but it appears they aren’t pursuing us, though they have formed a barricade it seems, perhaps to halt our retreat.”
“Well, why the hell would they do that?”
I answered my own question as the sound of spooling engines and wind whistling over wings sent a shiver up my spine. From our perch outside the tower, I could see flashes of thrusters lighting up the side of the tower as half a dozen Fixed-wings peeled off and circled into the sky. They soared into the clouds in a wide loop and then came in hard, firing on us with their machine guns. The rounds, white hot against the snowy air, spat out of the noses and churned into the deck, sending flakes of concrete into the air.
The first peeled off and banked away and the second came in, hitting us with a second
barrage. I dived between Greg’s legs — it was all I could do — the rounds pinging off his armor. The ground shook under me as I covered my head and curled into a ball. He reached down to further shield me with his arm and the sound of metal hitting metal at a thousand kilometers an hour cut through the air.
“Jesus Christ, we’re sitting ducks!” I yelled, uncovering my head just enough to see as the third one came in.
“It appears their forces have amassed just beyond the door. If we moved inside, we would be heavily outnumbered,” he said, twisting to chase the nearest Fixed-wing through the clouds with a line of rifle fire and sticky bombs. The bullets arced into the semi-darkness and fell to earth somewhere in the distance over the wasteland beyond the city. The bombs plumed with flame like popcorn in mid air. The plane twisted into a barrel roll and carved upwards out of sight. “And we won’t last much longer in our current position. What would you like to do?”
“Fire some fucking bombs! Shoot back!” I sank into my heels and pressed my back against the inside of Greg’s leg, clutching my pistol for no reason other than to do something with my shaking hands. I could feel my heart hammering against my ribs, my breath tight. Where the fuck were they? “And for fuck sake raise them on comms!” I yelled.
“We are still inside the interference radius, it seems. I’m not able to hail them.”
“They’re supposed to be here by now!” I grunted.
The clouds started flashing above, and seconds later, one of the Fixed-wings spiraled into view, trailing smoke and fire, engine howling.
Our Tilt-wing sidled down into view, thrusters humming blue as it leveled out and swung around to show us its back, peppering a passing Fixed-wing with cannonfire.
A third swept in from the right and showered the hull with bullets. It banked hard and dropped the tail, dipping out of the line of fire before letting off a pair of missiles that snaked after it and zoomed out of view around the building. It leveled out and backed up with precision, door opening. Damn, Volchec could fly.